DeepBrain Chain, a Public Blockchain that Works for the Entire AI Industry

DeepBrain, a high-profile project featuring artificial intelligence and blockchain, has recently raised $5m from GSR Venture Capital. It is the one and only AI computing platform driven by blockchain technology, providing solutions to pain points shared by AI companies across the globe: it helps to lower computing costs and create better privacy protection.

A team that brings AI and blockchain together

The DeepBrain team has been working on cutting-edge AI technology for the past few years. It is the pioneer in natural language processing (NLP) in China with tens of millions of users. It was ranked first in the Enterprise Sector in the Evaluation of Chinese Human-Computer Dialogue Technology (SMP2017 ECDT) organized by Harbin Institute of Technology in August this year, outperforming 30 top national AI teams from both the industry and academia.

The team members got into the blockchain and cryptocurrency world in 2014. With years of experience in the AI industry, the team knows better than anyone what the pain points of the industry are. AI products mainly consists of three parts: algorithms, computing power and data, and some of the underlying concepts of blockchain, such as smart contract and decentralization, are perfect solutions to the problems impeding the development of AI.

Two approaches for treating AI industry’s headaches

The data approach. It’s widely known that AI is a giant beast feeding on big data, so problems concerning the source and quality of data, together with the privacy issues require our immediate attention. The smart contracts on the blockchain protect data privacy through segregating data providers and data users, so that the latter have no idea where the data is when using the data for machine learning, hence no way to resell it to others. In the meantime, the learning itself is decentralized, too. The data are not run on users’ own servers; instead, the only things they can get are analytical data models generated from the training process.

The computing power approach. AI chips like GPUs iterate very fast, with an annual performance boost of 5 to 10 times. High performance AI servers cost an arm and a leg, and the quick iteration of the servers means that it is a huge cost for all enterprises in the AI industry. $25bn was raised during the past five years by AI companies, and it is very likely that every firm will become an AI firm in the future. The decentralization technology on the blockchain by DeepBrain provides the best solution for the computing power problem, which means a 70% cut in cost for AI companies.

The team recall that they started to get to know cryptocurrencies back in 2014 and didn’t take it seriously. “It was not until last year when we realized the importance of blockchain, and how the underlying mechanism of blockchain might be applied in the AI sector as solutions to some of the problems. However, it took us quite a long time to figure out how to implement it. Firstly, you need to understand the AI industry and the problems plaguing it. Secondly, you need to understand the fundamental ideas of the blockchain as well as cryptology. Thirdly, you need to find a way to bring cryptology, AI, distributed ledger and cloud computing together, which is actually very challenging. We started off solving the problems of our own AI products by using blockchain technology, but it turned out our solution works not just for us, it works for the entire industry.”

The team says that “DeepBrain is destined to be the public blockchain for the AI industry and will be run as a foundation. All talent in the blockchain and AI industry are welcome to join the community and together contribute to the development of artificial intelligence.”

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